As a Rule 5 Draft geek (never Rule V, please note), today is one of my favorite days of the year: 40-man roster deadline.

I’ve mellowed a bit as the years have past. I used to kill a million trees (or so Jonathan Mayo told me) printing out rosters and constantly updating them and then re-printing them.

This time I’m doing it all online and will not print out the 40s until they are final.

And hopefully someone will shoot me the list of all the players that are R5 eligible in the next few days *she said sweetly, batting her eyelashes like she had a piece of sand stuck in her eye*

But some things won’t change. I guarantee you that on the morning of Thursday, Dec. 8, I will be sitting in the front row of the ballroom in Dallas awaiting the start of the annual draft and suppressing my little squees of joy when players I know have been waiting for that chance to be on a 40-man roster and go to big league camp get their names called …

Will they make the cut? Will they be the next Dan Uggla, the first player to make the All-Star Team the year of his Rule 5 selection? Or other Rule 5 later-success poster boys like Johan Santana or Jose Bautista or Shane Victorino (a TWO-TIME Rule 5 pick), just to name a few?

Who knows. But it’s always fun to see the list of who’s available (and often to field phone calls, e-mails and Facebook messages from some of the eligible guys asking if I’ve heard their names in talks). Yes, eligible players often LOVE to be taken … it means people think they have what it takes to make it to the big leagues, maybe sooner than later, even if perhaps they’re stuck behind a perennial All-Star with their own team.

Let the games begin!